


Hearts.

by Ferith12



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: BUT ALSO HAPPY, Broken Hearts, Gen, Hearts, I don't really understand Tim, I'm Sorry, Metaphor, Oh the rampant metaphor, Or is this symbolism?, Sad, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 16:15:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6202246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hearts, or souls, or both, are strange things.  No two people have ones that are the same.<br/>They are also fragile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hearts.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for the last two. I really don't know Tim well at all, so I'm pretty sure I didn't do him justice, at all.  
> Damian's I've had in my head since this idea was conceived, like, four months ago. And somehow it still managed to be really short. And not really about Damian. And it ignores the fact that Dick thought Damian was a total brat at first. Hope you like it anyway. :)
> 
> This was so fun to write.
> 
> EDIT: sorry the tags make no sense. I tried to edit them, but it's not working.

Hearts, or souls, or both, are strange things. No two people have ones that are the same. 

They are also fragile.

 

When Dick was young, in the circus, his heart was a simple thing. A clear glass ball, maybe, hollow on the inside, breakable, but the essence of whole. It was, people thought, a rather pretty thing, smooth and round and pure and bright in the sunlight.

When Dick’s parent’s fell, his heart fell with them and broke into a hundred pieces.

People would have thought that that heart was ruined then, that once it had been broken it could never be repaired. Bruce thought that. But he didn’t want to. He took the boy in and hoped that by some miracle he would be able to put that broken heart back together.

But the thing about Dick’s broken heart, or soul or whatever it was, was that, Dick never bothered to fix it. he never hid it either, but kept it… well it was broken in a hundred pieces, so he could keep it a hundred places at once. 

And he did. He treated his heart with way less care than Bruce would like, Bruce wanted to gather them all up together in one place so that they could be put back together. But Dick’s heart was not meant to stay still any more than the rest of him was, and so the broken shards always separated or came together at the oddest angles, and he was always giving bits away to people, or exposing it to the ugliness of Gothom. The shards were still fragile, so soon they were broken again, and hundreds of fragments became thousands, and Bruce despaired of fixing it. He had broken it more than anyone since Tony Zucco, after all.

But here’s the funny thing: Dick didn’t mind. Every time one of those bits of glass shattered it hurt, and Dick felt lost and and BROKEN, because he was broken after all, this was his soul that was breaking. But, the thing about his soul was, it was made of glass, and the thing about broken glass is, it’s BEAUTIFUL. Dick’s broken heart shone as his whole, featureless one never had. It sparkled in the sunlight, because, even at night, Dick kept his heart in the light. And the light glinted of all the sharp angles in a near dazzling display of sparkling white and gold. There were other colors, too, because some of the shards had been cut into prisms reflecting rainbow light. And he kept it where people could see it. People saw Dick’s heart and smiled, and most of them didn’t even realize that the amazing thing they were seeing was broken.

Dick obviously wasn’t glad that he had watched his parents die. He wasn’t glad that he had had to experience all the painful things that came after. He wasn’t glad that he HURT, or that he would never be able to fix that hurt. But he knew that the result was sparkling and ever-changing and beautiful and him. So, in the end, he wouldn’t want it any other way.

 

No two hearts are the same, but Bruce’s and Dick’s were very similar.

They didn’t start out the same. No one is really sure what Bruce’s heart was like before, no one can quite remember, not accurately, not even Alfred. It wasn’t much  
like Dick’s simple glass ball, though. It was some sort of statuette, solid and delicate at the same time and extremely intricate. But just as Dick’s heart had fallen with his parents, Bruce’s had been shot with his and both hearts had shattered in a single moment. 

Broken glass looks a great deal like broken glass, it doesn’t make much difference what it looked like before it broke.

And so, when Bruce saw the crying little circus boy, kneeling in the blood and shards of broken heart, he saw another little boy kneeling in shards of broken soul glass, he saw himself. And he saw the boy as a second chance.

Because Bruce had never even tried to put himself back together. he had seen his heart shatter, and he had hated it. He had hated that his heart was so FRAGILE, he hated it for BREAKING, he did not see it sparkle as the shards skittered in the smoggy streetlights of the ally, and he had swept them up and put them away in the deepest darkest parts of him, where no one could see them, so that light could not hit them and set them to shining.

They’ve been sitting there ever since, untouched, perhaps unchanging. But Dick doesn’t think so. After all, he and bruce have hearts made of the same sort of glass, and those hearts are fragile. Dick knows that a great deal has happened to hurt Bruce, and locking his heart away does not provide it with extra padding. When the Dark Knight falls he puts his heart shards in a hard black shell, thinking it will protect it, but the unseen shards ricochet inside, breaking all the more.

But that’s alright, Dick thinks. The shards of Bruce’s heart may have crumbled to dust by now, but that’s alright, because the dust of heart-glass is stardust. If only Bruce would stop being afraid, and accept his own soul for the beauty it has, rather than all the could have beens and once weres.

(Because Batman is the Night, but in the smoggy city he seems to have forgotten that all the best nights have stars.) 

 

Then there was Jason. Jason who had died. Jason, the outcast, the broken child, the one who went crazy.

But here’s the strange thing about Jason: he never really broke.

Jason was born to a mess. He wasn’t born in darkness, really, because he was born to humans, he was born to humans who for all their problems and brokenness, were still redeemable people who loved him as much as they could.

Which really wasn’t very much. 

It wasn’t long before his father left. He had done it out of love for them, but he had previously been unloving enough for that idea to never occur to Jason, despite him being a very small boy who wanted to think the best of his father.

But Jason didn’t break when his father left. His soul had gotten a sound kick, but it hadn’t shattered. The kick only left a lot of dirt which smeared the shiny glass. Jason was born in a mess, and his soul was covered in it. But that made his soul tough. He had a glass soul like the others, but his was solid, strong glass, not flimsy glass ball or figurine. And his soul was never shot, never fell.

And so it was just layer upon layer of dirt and problems that covered his soul, until he lost it.

It was amazing, really, that he didn’t lose it sooner. Through all the pain of his parents leaving him, through all the hurt and the heartache, he never left sight of that strong, solid soul, that heart that burned and gave him a purpose, to save the urging of the world, to make it better. To make a DIFFERENCE. Solid, strong immovable, fiery, that was Jason, and through all the dirt and pain, he shone.

He did not lose sight of his soul when his father left him. And as his mother left him bit by bit to drugs, he still did not lose sight of that strength. 

Actually, perhaps his soul was not made of glass, but of diamond, it was a diamond buried and distorted by the dirt that it was covered in, but it was still a diamond and it still sparkled.

Then he became robin. Batman wasn’t really aware of the jewel buried in Jason’s soul, and he was ill-equipped to excavate that diamond of a soul, but still, flying as Robin, fighting, making a difference, made his soul shine a bit cleaner, peaking out from under the grime and dirt, burning all the hotter and brighter.

Then Jason died. 

Jason died. And if anything was to break him, that would. But Jason’s soul was made of adamant, and it didn’t break.

But when he died Jason did lose that diamond. Death covered it up in a whole new layer of dirt and pain and when he was made alive again he found that all the dirt had hardened into rock, and he forgot that his heart underneath was still strong and pure and bright.

It was still burning, though. It burned as it ever had for justice, but confined and forgotten as it was the heat of it scorched at the rock painfully and was a thing of hurt and rage that almost blindly needed to be set free. And so Jason fought for justice still, but without direction or compassion and he was crazy.   And his diamond heart was locked up under all that rough, dirty stone, and after a while everyone, especially Jason, thought that his heart was simply made of that stone, ugly, formless. But his soul was still his soul, the same as it always was. It still directed him as it always had, it was strong, and it was unbroken.

 

Tim’s heart was made of window glass.

His heart was made of window glass, perfectly crystal clear, the sort of glass that nobody would know was there until they touched its smooth coolness with their finger tips. It was a heart not made to be looked at but through.

That was Tim’s heart for a little while, when he was first Robin, clear and pure, showing people the truth of things. And for a while things were… things were GOOD. Not perfect, never perfect, but good. Tim was SEEN and seen THROUGH and he made the Batman better for it.

But… nothing stays that close to perfect. Not for Tim.

It was never anything to big enough to shatter Tim, not completely.

But life happened, and because it was TIM’S life it was full loss and death and HURT.

And each one was like a stone, thrown at that window.

And it wasn’t enough to shatter it, never enough to shatter, but it was enough to crack.

Life happened, and Tim grew up, and cracked. Spiderweb lines, fine, almost invisible, but THERE. No longer smooth, no longer strong, no longer pure.

But Tim looked at all those cracks with determination, carefully reinforcing them with glue, making sure not to let them grow, and making sure, as he gently kept himself in place, that his soul glass lost as little of its former crystal clarity as possible.

Then Bruce died.

Bruce died and it wasn’t like a stone thrown at his window glass of a heart, it was like an earthquake, shaking apart his soul, turning hairline-cracks into faultiness.

Only Bruce wasn’t dead, not really. Which meant Tim could save him, had to save him.

But no one believed him. Dick didn’t believe him. And Dick rejected him.

And that was almost worse than Bruce dying.

Now Tim didn’t repair his heart carefully with glass-glue. Now he used scotch tape, sloppily holding himself together as best he could. He didn’t care anymore about  
being seen through, he had a job to do, and that was all that mattered.

After that Tim wasn’t the same. His soul was crisscrossed with jagged-edged cracks, sloppily stuck together with tape.

But he still held together, somehow. And through it all, all that mess of cracks and dirty tape, you could still see the truth of things if you looked.

 

Damian’s heart was made of obsidian. Dark, hard, wild glass.

It was just a lump of it, lying there, his formless soul, except for a few bits his mother had used to make knives and arrowheads. His soul was made for killing, and aside from that was good for little else.

At least that was what most people saw. That's what most people said.

They saw Damian, and they saw a creature with a black, formless soul. They said he was a monster.

But Dick? Dick saw an opportunity.

Because Damian’s heart was just a lump of volcanic stone, with a few shards of pride and bitterness formed into the shape of weapons. That was all it was. But that  
was all it was NOW. Because Damian’s heart was just waiting for some one to come along and carve it into something new.

What would a heart look like, carved from wild obsidian? It would be like nothing anyone had ever seen before. And if done right? If carved right, such a heart could become truly beautiful, a masterpiece.

And Dick, Dick’s heart had a lot of sharp little shards of glass, perfect for carving things.


End file.
